The present invention is directed to a cradle switch for a telephone apparatus, which has a housing with an opening in a wall and a cradle at the opening. The switch includes a carrier having movable switch contacts, an actuating lever mounted at one end to the carrier for pivotal movement to activate the contacts and a switch member, which extends through the opening in the wall of a housing and into the cradle, engaging the lever to mechanically actuate or pivot the lever.
A carrier with spring contacts of a known cradle switch is designed as an injected synthetic part and contains contact springs which cooperate as spring assemblies. The actuation lever enables the excursion of the free ends of the contact springs of the spring assemblies by, for example, a control slide movable on a straight line in the contact carrier and thus enables a variation or switching of the contact positions.
What is referred to as a switching member are mechanical actuating elements, which may be a plunger, button or bar and which are accessible from the outside of the housing of the telephone. The elements can usually have their position in the housing opening influenced by means of lifting off or depositing the handset from or respectively onto the apparatus housing. The elements then transmit their movement caused by removing and replacing the handset in the cradle to the actuating lever of the cradle switch in the interior of the housing of the telephone apparatus.
Given a telephone, whose functional parts are to be allocated exclusively to a chassis, surrounded by a molded housing, it is considered undesirable for reasons of rational assembly to have the insertion of the switching members into the molded housing as a separate assembly operation in order to obtain a captive anchoring of these members in the housing of the apparatus.